Without the “Fall” can there be a need for “atonement”?

This is a long one, so I’ll provide the bottom line up front, and you can judge if you want to go through how I got there.

Humankind has never been sinless.  Claiming some discrete act can “wash us white as snow” to atone for that sin cheapens the monumental effort necessary to truly seek to take up our cross and follow Christ’s actual teachings from his life rather than focusing so much on his death.

I grew up a “creationist.”  I walked into the first day of my 9th grade biology class clutching a copy of “The Collapse of Evolution” I purchased from Chick Publications (shudder) equipped with the full  Armor of God and ready to witness to my wordly teacher.  The theology I had been given was expressly set up such that without inerrancy and the Creation story, it all… well… collapses.  

Lets carefully establish some terms

Romans 5:12-21 frames a lot of the New Testament theology on The Fall and it’s requiring an “atonement” provided by Christ’s death.  I’ll quote the entire passage at the end of this essay for you to review as you please.  For now I’ll define “The Fall” as at least:

An event or process where before it, Man was in a state where they had direct communion with God, but Man through their own action did something wrong (sin) that resulted in separation from God.  Sin, and because of it, separation from God, is now the default, “fallen” state for all mankind.  

Genesis 3 narrates the fall as a single man and woman, and a discrete act, and Romans 5 affirms this.  Genesis 3 and Romans 5 (and Romans 6:23) in plain language say that the consequences of the fall was “death” and that before it men didn’t physically die.  Of course some modern theology generally reframes this as “spiritual death” which is described as separation from God.  That is super hand wavy, but whatever, that’s why I initially defined the fall so narrowly without the stuff about eternal life and a single man and a woman, since those aren’t crucial to the theology of many Christians.  But I wanted to acknowledge that “The Fall” means a lot more to some Christians.

Atonement is a portmanteau of “At One ment” meaning a restoration of the connection to God.  Jewish Temple Theology had a “Day of Atonement” where the high priest annually offered sacrifices in the Temple Holy of Holies to atone for the people’s sins.  In the Gospels, when Christ died, the curtain cordoning off this sacred section of the temple that was supposed to have God’s presence was spontaneously torn in two which represents Christ’s death restoring our connection to God’s presence.  

There are actually divergent “theories” on important details surrounding why atonement is needed and just how Christ accomplished it.  Some of the versions I am familiar with are:

• Christus Victor:  Christ died and achieved victory over sin and death, and maybe over Satan and such in the process.

• Ransom:  lots of verbiage in the NT is along these lines.

• Satisfaction:  developed by medieval theologians when Justice for a transgression depended on the social status/honor of the one transgressed upon.  God has infinite “honor” so atonement for a transgression is outside mortal means and requires intervention in the form of God made flesh and sacrificed.

• Penal Substitutionary Atonement:  the version evangelicals preach, it is new as a product of the Reformation but derives from the above. Briefly, sin must be punished with death and damnation, but Christ’s death on the Cross substitutes for that punishment.

Interestingly, western theologians were uncomfortable with atonement being required of an omnipotent God due to something external to that God. Because of this, the later two theories were developed to shift the focus away from external forces Christ’s sacrifice is victorious over or ransoming towards, to God being the one who needs satisfaction or Justice.  One framing is, God was mad and became man so he could kill himself as a sacrifice to himself to appease his own anger.  

The above exercise serves to demonstrate that the theology behind atonement has been fluid.  

Sin.  It will be difficult to bound this into something concise, and my conclusions on the subject decisively diverge from standard theology.  From above, Sin is the bad thing that brings death, separates us from God, and and drives the need for atonement.  As for what that thing is, at a minimum it is actions that displease God.  For trying to understand what those actions are, I fall back on what Christ describes as the two greatest commandments he said all other law and religion relies on (Matthew 22:36-40 along with many other reflected passages).  Paraphrased 

1. Love God with everything you are.

2. Love your neighbor as you love yourself  

I really struggle with wrapping my head around the first because in my reading of the Bible, the nature of God as described in various portions of the Bible is incredibly inconsistent (I get most Christian’s have to maintain consistency and will disagree, but I am rock solid on this claim, and will bring some receipts later).  So when I try to understand what it means to Love God with everything I am, I fall back on Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46.  In this parable, which is explicitly about who gets to enter into the Kingdom of God vs eternal punishment, Christ says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”  

From that I feel confident in claiming that the best way to be assured that I am meeting the first commandment to love God, is to love “the least of these.”  

So in conclusion, 

It is my understanding that the core of what is Sin is to not live out Christ’s command to love your neighbor and do unto the least of these by caring for the hungry, the needy, the stranger, the sick, and the prisoner (Matthew 25:35&36).

This is critical so I wish to test this understanding a couple ways before I move on.  

Test 1:  A counter test.  Paul in Romans 5 generally only discussed sin in terms of not following the law (of Moses) and “breaking a command, as did Adam.”  So I can concede that for Paul and the followers of the Laws of Moses, it is understood that Sin can be directly against God rather than just between men.  However, the Christianity I was raised in taught we are free from that law (Galatians 5).  This means that if I want to pull a shift at work on Saturday, enjoy bacon on my cheeseburger, or not cut off my son’s foreskin, I’m not sinning against God.  This is inconsistent.  

Additionally my earlier claim that the portrayal of God in the Bible is inconsistent completely applies to what God commanded his people to do.  Multiple times in 1st Samuel, it is made clear that King Saul lost God’s favor by disobeying God’s command and not doing a good enough job committing genocide against women and children.  The least of these.  Which according to Christ, we are commanded to love.  A command that all other law hangs on.  

THIS IS INCONSISTENT.  And from that I conclude that the only sure way to sin against God is to sin against the least of these.  I do not trust “commands of God” “revealed” by this inconsistent “Word of God.”

Test 2:  An appeal to what is self evident.  I’ve recently asked for witness as to what Christ’s salvation can mean to me having lost the ability to believe in “The Fall” as defined above.  Multiple Christian responses were an appeal to the self-evident proposition that the world is sinful and needs saving.  I agree that the world has suffering and death (even independent of the actions of men, but especially due to the “sinful” actions of men), and that by default we as humans are incapable of fully living out Christ’s commands as described above.  But there is no evidence of sin towards God independent of revelation of what God’s Commands are from someone or something who isn’t God.  

The only self-evident sin is sin against my fellow man.  Having lost faith in “revelation” of God’s commands from the inconsistency of The Bible, and having been told to look to the self-evident nature of sin in the world, I say, yes there is sin in the world, but only in evidence between men themselves, and only by that inter-relational sin can we sin against God.   

So having gone through those two tests, I’ll rephrase my earlier conclusion:

Sin is, and only is, not doing right to our fellow man.  

Moving on.

Rejection of The Fall narrative and then atonement:

At no point was man without sin.  This means there was no perfect, sinless communion that we fell from and can be restored to.  If you don’t believe the biological obviousness of that, I probably can’t convince you of it with any essay, so I would skip that, except for the purpose of applying the concept to atonement.  

At no point was Creation/the world not constrained by limited resources, competition for those resources, and the suffering that is inherent to that competition.  That is the current status of reality and it was the status for the billions of years before man walked the earth.  Christ promised that that wouldn’t be the case when his kingdom came, but that prophecy expired within the generation of those he was talking to, so unless I’m wrong on that, the world will continue to exist in this state for so much longer than the 2,000 years since that promise was given that 2k will be as a blink of an eye.

But I want to narrow down a bit on some aspects of the limitations of creation more specific to mankind.  

Not only are we a product of environmental resource competition, but we are physiologically limited in our ability to recognize all our neighbors as fully real beings.  

This limitation has actually been quantified and is referred to as “Dunbar’s Number” where we can only hold in our minds about 150 people, and everyone else just doesn’t matter to us.  Cracked.com has an article about this that is incredibly humorous, crude, scientifically astute, and amazingly insightful called “What is The Monkeysphere.”  It is this bedrock principle that makes it such a tragedy when your former classmate’s 7 year old daughter dies of cancer after 2 years of struggle you’ve followed on Facebook, but you are unlikely to have shed a single tear for the half a million children a year who die from malaria.  

The classmate, and by association his/her child is a living breathing person to you but 99.999% of the other 8 billion humans on the planet aren’t.  Most people care more about the well-being of their dog (as measured in tears upon passing, or resources expended maintaining that wellbeing) than just about anyone on the planet not within a day’s walking distance.  

This for me is our sinful nature.  To fully follow Christ’s two most important commandments is to fully embrace that we are limited by this biological fact and strive to overcome it with everything we are.  Nothing about Christ’s death changes this biological fact.  No atonement will erase this hardwired, sinful aspect of who we are to allow us to be at one with God.  No “sanctification by the Holy Spirit” will rewire our physiology and amplify our empathetic capacity so that we are capable of loving all 8 billion people on the planet the way we care for and about our own dog.  

Humankind has never been sinless.  Claiming some discrete act can “wash us white as snow” to mask atone for that sin cheapens the monumental effort necessary to truly seek to take up our cross and follow Christ’s actual teachings from his life rather than focusing so much on his death.

As promised, Romans 5:12-21 (NIV)

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—

13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.